Wikia Search Infrastructure And Organization Discussion
The Wikia Search project (Wikipedia-model search engine) mailing list has had a thread discussing the status of updates and the social organization of the project, and which sort of arrangement would be best for the goals of having an open search project. There's been some confusion between who owns what part of the current technical infrastructure. Paul Vixie, who runs the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) clarified (comment reformatted for readability):
The servers were donated to ISC, not Wikia. The bandwidth they use is provided by ISC. Wikia has donated a 15-ton air conditioner, a smattering of network switches and front end servers, and a heaping lot of [Wikia search lead]'s time and other Wikia staff time. Wikia has agreed in principal to underwrite the power costs of the ISC physical plant used by the crawlers and indexers. But as for a [different organization] there already is one (see www.isc.org, ugly though it is) and i think it's odd that anybody is still worried about that part. ISC is a 501(c)(3) [nonprofit] whose mission is public benefit. If anybody here thinks we're either incompetent or untrustworthy with regard to owning and operating a search engine backend, I'd thank you very much to call me on the phone and explain your concerns to me realtime.
My view is that the problem is not ISC's bona-fides. Rather, it's more the issue of Wikia's incentives as a VC-backed startup, versus the optimum structure of an open-source search project. Focusing on Paul Vixie or ISC shifts towards what I call the "positive" ad-hominem argument (roughly: "I'm a good person. Therefore, what I do must be good. If you say it's bad, you're saying I'm bad person. Because only a bad person does bad things. But I'm a good person, and you are then a bad person for saying otherwise. Therefore, you must be wrong. Because I'm a good person").
I'm a strong supporter of the ideas of Free Software and Open Source. But Wikia seems to be doing the worst implementation of this kind of project. Which is the arrangement where supposedly programmers do unpaid labor because they just luvvvv programming, and businesses make money off the honey from the little worker-bees.
Semi-related, there's an amusing graph of the Wikia Search Hype Cycle
Are you going to help take it to the next level?
Hmmm ...that's "you", as in you-Yes-YOU? No. I don't think so. I'm very wary of the way Wikia is positioned to "brand" everyone's work as its own (after all, that's happening right now with ISC's servers), and to commercialize itself anything of value from independent developers.
My _Guardian_ column on Wikia Search 0.2
"When you have a Wikipedia,
everything looks like an edit"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/may/08/wikipedia.searchengines
Building an editable encyclopedia is nothing compared with the challenge of building a search engine that can take on Google
Note the front of the Guardian site has it as "Wikia Search is doomed to fail", which wouldn't be my preferred title or summary (I didn't write either of them), though they're not wrong either. I know it's conceivable that Wikia Search might not "fail" in terms of producing something that Wikia can sell (perhaps to Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo), or even turn a profit - especially given how many expenses they've shifted off to others. I'm sure they'd count that as a "success" (and it's all due to you-Yes-YOU!). But I don't see any prospect for it having a deep effect on the field of search (the field of getting people to work for free is a different matter).
The idea I'd like people to take away though, which I did write, is this:
"But the idea that these simple systems can be applied to deep value-laden social problems, of politics, or even relevant search results, is like trying to use a hammer to turn screws on the basis that it works so well to hit nails."
[For all columns, see the page Seth Finkelstein | guardian.co.uk.]
[Post updated since the front site title is different from the article title]
Wikia Search : A Media Case Study on "the human touch to outsmart Google"
There's a Wikia Search puff piece in the Los Angeles Times: Wikia's Weird Dream: "A new search engine from the minds behind Wikipedia relies on the human touch to outsmart Google. Does it stand a chance?"
It won't do any good for me to rant about this to my tiny audience, but I'll do it anyway in vain hope it'll show some of my critics that the hype I'm talking about does indeed exist:
Wikia, working from modest headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., is attempting something at least as audacious as Wikipedia's launch was in 2001: It is building a for-profit search engine to compete with Google. There are no legions of engineers. Instead, the endeavor is powered as nonprofit Wikipedia is: by volunteers. (Wikia and Wikipedia are different companies; all they have in common, besides a "by the people and for the people" philosophy, is their co-founder, Wales.)
Note how Wikia is given a halo effect from Wikipedia - "by the people and for the people" is much more accurately rendered "by the unpaid and for the investors". And later on, the answer as to how this sales-pitch works:
Why would volunteers donate their time to help a for-profit company?
"Wikia Search is basically doing something unique," says Mark Williams, an 18-year-old college student who lives on the south coast of England. He estimates that he puts in up to 20 hours a week rating search results for Wikia and writing mini-articles. "It's changing the future of how people can search, so that they know how and why certain results are coming up, and if they don't like the results then they can say so."
You - yes, YOU - can say so! And if your contribution helps a corporation make more money, then you can have a warm and fuzzy feeling from it. Unemployment insurance? Health benefits? A union? How can these compare to changing the future? (a semi-serious question).
Observer that the guy apparently hasn't heard of any of all the other social-search engines. That's the value to Wikia of all the publicity from Wikipedia (not the tiny bits of PageRank that might be sent to some Wikia sites from any hypothetical Wikipedia favoritism towards Wikia, or even various personnel connections).
Wikia executives have another criticism of Google. They look at its inability to control spam from its e-mail service, Gmail, and they see a parallel with the search engine: Google has been unable to entirely eliminate irrelevant search results. "I'm constantly surprised by how much money, how many computers, how many algorithms go into preventing spam, and yet every day I look in my mailbox and I go, -Dude, that's not right,' " Penchina says. What's striking, he says, is how much better people can do than Google's software in filtering out unwanted e-mail. In the same way, he says, volunteers can do that with search results.
Why, yes, if you can get a large pool of uncompensated labor to do lots of scut-work, that would work very well. The trick is, of course, getting that in the first place.
Meanwhile, all the Wikia-bashing has also resulted in some goodwill, even sympathy, from critics. Sherman of Searchengineland was critical of Wikia Search's launch, but he says he would like to see the underdog pull off an upset. "I'm kind of rooting for them because of the David versus Goliath aspect," he says. "Google has started taking on aspects of the Microsoft evil empire - it's too big, too dangerous. And isn't it cool that we're going to have an upstart that will give us an alternative?"
Volunteer for us to fight the Evil Empire! (pay no attention to the money we'd like to make off of you - you're changing the future, you're part of The Revolution!)
Others warn it would be a mistake to underestimate Wikia Search based on its early performance. "Anyone who is selling Jimmy Wales short over the launch is going to be in for a surprise," says John Palfrey of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. "He's leveraging many of the same things that made Wikipedia a global force. I think Wikia can have a huge impact on search engines over time."
And here is again why I will never be an insider, a club-member. I'd concur that Wikia Search is *trying* to leverage many of the same things as Wikipedia - but in my view that's not necessarily good.
Wikimedia Foundation Community Petition about "governance" and "community"
Wikipedia hype meets harsh reality:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Meta:Community_petition (Wikipedia site version) [via Danny Wool]
I'll simply quote it, since it says all that needs to be said:
Petition to the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees:
We, volunteers, ask the Board to give the volunteer community a fair voice in Foundation governance. During its most recent meeting, the Board of Trustees not only rejected a proposal to improve community input in Foundation matters, but implemented an unexpected restructuring to reduce the community seats on the board. The community was not consulted about this reduction in representation and the board provided no explanation for this change. [1]
That is not a good way to treat people who donate their time and labor. The volunteer base made this the seventh most popular website in the world. We expect courtesy and respect, but received neither. That hurts morale.
Please provide a full explanation for recent board decisions and reconsider your top-down approach.
I keep telling the people who donate much of their time to Wikipedia:
Don't ever risk anything for Wikipedia, since it won't risk anything
for you. You're fed a line about "community" and "knowledge",
but you're utterly powerless. And when it comes down to a crunch,
you're merely unpaid labor with no rights, who can be discarded at a
moment's notice.
And if you think I'm just a bombastic critic, well, he said it, not me (Brad Patrick, former Wikimedia Foundation general counsel and interim executive director) [via "Durova"]
It would be best for those critical of the Board (and feeling that the community is the most important ideal) to remember that whether you like it or not, agree with it or not, or would have selected an alternative reality or not, it is still the case that the Board is that which governs the Wikimedia Foundation, ... As is oft-repeated, WMF is not a membership organization.
Within the spirit of civil discourse, to those who are feeling frustrated and demanding action, I submit - "so what are you going to do about it?" I suggest you be pragmatic. You do not have any means of grabbing the reins of power from the Board, and you don't have any entitlement to anything except your ability to participate in a project, if you choose, a chapter, if you choose, or to speak up in some forum. You don't have a "right" to vote on anything, and the Board could just as easily have a contest than an election to fill Board seats. [... snip]
Stop whining and ask yourself if you have the objective qualifications to lead an international organization. If not, work on obtaining the skills to be such a leader, if you choose. Toiling on a project is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition to be a Board member at WMF.
Or, get back to the data-mines, suckers.
The funniest thing about this is Jimmy Wales has been appointed a special slot that's counted as a "community" seat.
Wikipedia as Google-Weapon
A huge hornet's nest has been stirred up with the posting of some private emails about supposed plans by a group, "isra-pedia", to use various tactics on Wikipedia to favor pro-Israel viewpoints in various disputes. There's alleged leaked group mail (the host website is untrustworthy, but Wikipedia administrative discussion provides some evidence that the group mail is authentic). My favorite part:
Every time you see a Hamas person makes an outragous statements (like Jews came from apes or kill the jews) you write a small article about that peroson (google his name to find more ) and bring the quote from memri.
why doing all that ?
because google is wikipedia friend - 3 days after you created the article google the person's name again and voila your article will be the #1 in google for that name.
It's by no means news that Wikipedia's Google rank can be used to go after people. But it's nice to have it stated so bluntly and with such obvious intent.
Now, the plans outlined seems to have been more somebody's idea of a good manipulation scheme than anything which they were able to do. But maybe this is merely amateurs who couldn't pull it off, and got caught.
Wikia Search - When You Have A Wikipedia, Everything Looks Like An Edit
I continue to be unimpressed by Wikia Search, the Wikipedia-model search engine. They've released a bunch of new "social" features for editing and annotating specific results, which are not in and of themselves bad things. Yet I keep wanting to say, but, but, but, there's no real search engine there. Nobody gushing over all the pretty buzzword-compliant aspects seems to care that when putting lipstick on a pig, underneath, it's still a pig. Maybe they think a sufficient amount of lipstick on the pig emergently create a useful search engine.
As I understood the initial Wikia Search concept, volunteers were supposed to build Jimmy Wales a search engine for free, that the venture-capital backed start-up Wikia Inc. could then monetize with ads (or presumably flip in a sale if the opportunity arose), because this would then prove The People open-source amateurs can challenge the closed proprietary Google elitists. Or something like that - obviously it wasn't stated so bluntly.
A major problem here is that search engines require very specialized expertise, for which companies are willing to pay big money, so almost nobody wants to give it away for the good of Wales's gold-plated washing machine, I mean, humanity.
But the latest iteration of Wikia Search seems to be trying to use the very poor search technology as a seed page for human-edited results. That is, an unpaid, voting-driven, Mahalo.com. I suppose if the workers aren't paid, anything at all is profit. But I can't help but think this is turning into a proof of my theory that Wikipedia is basically a weird thing, which doesn't export the secret of the fountain of free labor.
When I hear the word "Wikipedia", I reach for my flame-thrower
I frequently get negative reactions for writing critically about Wikipedia. I'm not even talking about the Kool-Aid poisoned True Believers, who can't grasp how someone could not love the wonderful wiki-world which has provided them purpose in life. Rather, net-activist friends have suggested my efforts are misdirected. And there's others who argue I'm simply too harsh.
Today I received a promotional postcard for Jonathan Zittrain's new book The Future of the Internet - And How to Stop It. This was obviously a targeted marketing mailing from the publisher (from the format of my address). I've in fact been thinking about the ideas for a while.
The postcard has three people blurbing the book. The first is a very high status law professor. The third is the "Executive Chairman and Founder of the World Economic Forum". And the second is ... "Jimbo Wales, Founder, Wikipedia" (not CO-founder, Wikipedia), who says:
Jonathan Zittrain does what no one has before -- he eloquently and subtly pinpoints the magic that makes Wikipedia, and the Internet as a whole, work. The best way to save the Internet is to turn off your laptop until you've read this book.
This sort of hype is why I think the cult of Wikipedia needs some deprogrammers. The "magic that makes Wikipedia" strikes me as more like a sweatshop than Santa's workshop. To me, it represents much that's wrong with the future of the Internet, in terms of the promotion of a model of masses of powerless people working for free while a tiny, tiny, elite makes out like bandits.
This puts me at odds with certain groups, where cheerleading Wikipedia is part of the game. But much of my writing is against lottery-like systems anyway, and I often argue against playing a game where almost everyone loses.
My _Guardian_ column on "Access Denied" World Censorware Book
"If you block online porn, you'll surely block dissent in China"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/17/internet.censorship
"The issue of whether the internet can be censored, and how governments are trying to do it, continues to be fought around the world"
[Sigh ... remember, I don't get to write the titles ...]
This column is about the OpenNet Initiative's book "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering", and what it might portend.
[For all columns, see the page Seth Finkelstein | guardian.co.uk.]
"Expelled" Google-lobbying
Expelled Exposed is a rebuttal to an anti-evolution films. There's what I'll call a "Google-lobbying" campaign around the search rankings:
We need to get the NCSE's [National Center for Science Education's] counter-site to the hideous little propaganda film, Expelled, to rank higher in the search engines. The way to do this is for lots and lots of you to link to the Expelled Exposed site with the word Expelled.
Note I'd say this isn't a "Google-bomb", since the target site wants the high ranking itself. And Google's algorithmic changes to defuse the bombs aren't applicable here, since the words appear extensively on the site.
On the other hand, I don't know if they'll be enough interest to have much impact, unless it becomes a cause-celebre. We'll see.
